“A lot you know about them!” She laughed at him, with a sidelong glance, but quickly returned to her contemplation. “I was thinking.”
“What?”
She shook her head. A leaf-pattern of shadows and golden flame settled once more upon it, trembling.
“The river-drivers,” she answered at last. “I was only thinking about the river-drivers.”
Following her glance, he tried, as he had so often tried in the last weeks, to see with her eyes. The peace of the pool beside them, like all peace in Nature, was an illusion. Minnows steered over the brown sand, or whipped their magnified shadows, blurred and globular, through sunny patches under the farther bank; even where the water lay most dark and thick, weeds tugged slowly at the tether; and over the surface her “river-drivers,” snapping and kicking between wind and water, floated erratically down an imperceptible current.
“About those?” he asked incredulously. “What, those beetles?”
“Yes.” Her eyes danced with that look of hers which he had never seen in any other person,—a look both grave and whimsical. “Yes, they’re only beetles. See, though: they scoot here and there, but always head upstream. They can’t have any reason to, and it’s so much easier going down. And still they’re stubborn, and fight along. I wonder—I think they must have an Idea.”
“You’re a funny girl!” he laughed. Yet as he watched, the darting insects began to appear not wholly insensate.
“Now the fish down there,” she continued, as though to herself, “they nose about their business. And the day-flies—with them it’s all dancing,—just eat, drink, and be merry. But the river-drivers—see that one, floating on the blade of grass, all tired out; and there he goes again, up and up, and all the time carried below. They’re like—like people. They’re betwixt and between, like us. And it may be no use. But they must. Their Idea. And the stream flows down and down, and sweeps everything—”
Her words were quiet as the brook beyond.